Information storage devices commonly include magnetic media in the form of multiple magnetic disks for storing information. The optimization of the magnetic media for such information storage devices is a tradeoff relating to many competing design constraints. In particular, many media parameters improve when the media is made magnetically “softer” resulting in wider written tracks. However, this degrades the performance in the drive when data are written on adjacent tracks and some of the on-track information is degraded because the track is too wide. There are several measurements that assess the impact of writing on adjacent tracks, including, for example, squeeze measurements, adjacent track interference signal to noise ratio (ATI-SNR) measurements, and error rate final measurements. However, these measurement techniques commonly offer little or no insight into how the adjacent track writes are impacting the original data.